Online education: Shortcuts could hurt students

In the abstract, online courses hold much promise for the University of California – but only if they are created and executed with precision and an unwavering focus on excellence. As momentum builds for offering more online education opportunities, it is important to step back and understand what goes into creating a single UC course offering.

A University of California course is created by UC faculty, has curriculum approved by UC faculty, and is taught by UC faculty. All UC courses have rigorous content and demand the highest intellectual engagement from their students: they reason, question, debate, write, and theorize to master the skills necessary for leading California into a brighter future.

An online University of California course shifts the venue from a physical space to a virtual one but does not abandon any of these elements.

Once approved by an interdisciplinary faculty committee a UC course is recognized for UC credit on all of our campuses.

Within this context, an extraordinary array of educational experiences can take place.

• A senior professor might share with several hundred freshmen in an auditorium or viewing video – in a “gateway” course – the excitement she and her colleagues have just experienced as they “saw” the universe 1.8 billion years ago or discuss the latest findings of the Mars Curiosity Rover. Those freshmen might also gather in small groups led by graduate student instructors to explore the building blocks of knowledge and analytical skills that led to the breakthrough. Students completing the course will have been introduced to basic principles of physics and astronomy and will know what they need to learn if they want to go further. They will also have formed friendships and mentor relationships that can help them advance.

• Another professor might challenge 30 sophomores in a classroom or logged into an interactive webinar to analyze how the form in which pollsters ask questions influences the answers. She might ask them to experiment by polling fellow students with different versions of the same question. Such critical thinking is foundational to statistics, linguistics, and political science, and the exercise might be part of a general education course applicable to any of those disciplines.

• Faculty may take note of the high proportion of students who struggle with the subject matter in an introductory course. Without resources to add discussion sections, faculty today may collaborate with graduate student assistants to develop self-paced digital tutorials that help students through particularly difficult segments.

UC faculty are embracing digital technologies to create and offer online courses and course supplements that enrich students’ educational experience and improve their success in advancing through a rigorous curriculum. Over the past three weeks, over 100 faculty members submitted letters of interest that show how the university might make the most fruitful investments in online course development.

In the coming months, UC will be ramping up our already extensive offerings in the online arena. We will focus on offering UC students the best possible learning experience integrated into the specialized and up-to-date curricula that are possible only in a great research university. We will deploy digital technology to offer courses that are in high demand and are prerequisite for many majors. Most emphatically, we will encourage collaboration across campuses. But we will also devote resources to the same ends in more subtle ways such as developing supplementary materials that improve success rates, and ultimately graduation rates.

We will also be realistic. Online courses supplement but do not replace face-to-face courses. Online courses are neither cheap nor easy to create. Nor are they static. They must be continuously evaluated and improved and updated when needed. The UC Academic Senate will collaborate with the UC administration in a multifaceted and thorough evaluation process. We have appointed a panel of experts to assess UC’s systemwide online efforts on an ongoing basis. We must not be satisfied to simply have online courses; we must have courses that are at least as effective and up-to-date as our regular offerings and that provide our students the same intellectual engagement.

Shortcuts will shortchange our students – whether they are at UC for four years or come to us as junior transfers. A UC course cannot be replaced with video lectures and computer scored template assignments provided by an outside vendor. UC students deserve UC instructors. Our basic courses are necessary steps for our students’ success in advanced courses and beyond UC. We cannot outsource them without betraying our students’ trust.

Powell, Chair of the UC Academic Senate, is a professor at UC Davis; Jacob, Vice Chair of the Academic Senate, is a professor at UC Santa Barbara.